govcraft_historical_recordsfandomcom-20200213-history
Server History
The Closed Beta Period: 12 December 2015 - 29 February, 2016 GovCraft began as a simulation to test a thesis which identified the purposes the state. For the first few months of its existence, the community underwent three experiments, held every few weeks, to test this thesis. During this time, the server was not publicly advertised and did not have a website, though it still maintained an active player base of roughly forty, with a peak-time record of 18 players online. Between 12 and 20 votes were received in senatorial and presidential elections. During this time, the server staff consisted of the server's owner, functioning as a Moderator and Administrator, Emperor_of_Blah, and the moderator Poly_Sci_Mage. Launch and the Inaugural Terms: 12 December 2015 - Christmas, 2015 Early settlements For the first week, initial settler groups, presented with a wilderness vaster and thicker than any they had ever seen, struggled to establish homesteads; it would take ten days before anyone would even see the west coast, let alone settle it. The first elections proved uneventful: there was nothing yet to govern. Instead, most people headed east, preferring to sail up and down the eastern seaboard, rather than to attempt to break through the Appalachians. The first stable settlement, a system of boroughs carved into, and named for, mount Lafayette, was founded on December 12, and soon became the capital of the state of New Hampshire. Another small group attempted to establish Boston, but found the foliage too thick to manage, and returned to spawn after a day. Persistent, they sailed into Chesapeake bay and up what they called the Washington river (the Susquehanna), and established a new settlement, Pallet Town, on its banks. This proximity to spawn briefly made the city the most populous in the enter country. At the same time, Poly_Sci_Mage, a server mod, set sail for Mississippi. He followed the east coast south, rounding the Florida panhandle and landing on the shore of what he believed to be the mouth of the Mississippi river. After spending some hours cutting into the dense jungle of what he eventually realized was southern Florida, he packed up his items and abandoned the settlement to the "Ridiculous Jungle". The next day, his friend, Letsdance7, far behind, attempted to make for Mississippi by land. Heading straight west, he found the narrow beginning of the Ohio river, and sailed down it. This eventually lead him to the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio rivers, the real-life location of Cairo, Kentucky. He sent word to Poly, who headed up the river to join him. There, on a peninsula which jutted out into the confluence zone, they established the city of Cairo, and established the state of New Egypt. A replica of the building which had briefly stood in Florida now stood as the statehouse. Not only had the New Egyptians created the furthest west settlement and the furthest west state, but also the first socialist state in the entire country. The state government had three branches: the Hammer Council, which taxed people's mining output, the Sickle Council, a national farming collective, and the Star Council, which set the output quotas for the two other councils, and which was composed only of an un-elected chairman and his advisers. Poly_Sci_Mage held this position from the inception of the state. This system worked extremely well with regulating the heavily agricultural, nonindustrial economy of the early-server. After a few days, on December 14, a player named Forensic attacked Pallet Town, burning down the town hall and razing the town farms. Several witnesses reported him, and the senate voted 3-1 to ban him soon after. The town authority quickly constructed a large wall around the city and repaired the property damage, but the attack had inflicted a perminent wound. Believing that they had settled too close to spawn, the city's founders returned to the site of their failed Boston settlement, and established a state. The three or so people they had convinced to settle in Pallet Town slowly left, selling their farms and houses at a loss. Most of these players began to head south, settling in the Piedmont of the Carolinas. The Bostonians, meanwhile, had managed to cut a sizable clearing into the forest which had initially proven so impregnable. Even as the settlement began to urbanize, trees still punctuated the landscape, and oak-wood planks still remained the dominant building material, used everything from the houses to the streets. As Boston became increasingly developed, boasting a tram system, a public park, and the first interstate carriageway in the country (connecting their city to Lafayette), other settlements sprang up in close proximity: to the south lay a small settlement called Scituate, and, on the eastern tip of Long Island, another group established the village of Deerwood, a town which would quickly became the capital of a new state: Southern New England. There were some early westward movements, as well. A few days prior, a lone explorer, GreatGamer7, had struck out for New York, found it too heavily forested, and had instead decided to settle on the southern shore of Lake Erie, where he founded the city of Radiant Gardens, and the state of Ohio. While the settlement's isolation made growing the population difficult, the state managed to subsist for a time, using the wide open planes of the Midwest to establish the state as the national leader in cattle ranching, an important commodity to the southwest in populous Cairo, which had several farms, but no livestock. There had been one group, however, which had traveled even further than both the Ohioans and the New Egyptians. They had set out from Washington around the fourteenth, bound for a greater goal than anyone had yet dared to consider: the west coast. They received direction from Poly_Sci_Mage, sailing down the east coast as he had, and then rounding the Florida pan handle. From there, Poly advised they sail across the Gulf of Mexico, find the mouth of the Rio Grande, sail up it, and head west. However, after rounding the Panhandle, they stopped at the abandoned settlement, and decided to follow the coast west on horse instead. After they reached the mouth of the Mississippi, and headed North West. After crossing the Ozarks, they got lost for five days (until Dec. 19) in the expansiveness of the great planes, wondered into what is believed to have been Wyoming, ran out of resources, and starved to death in the mountains. Formalizing the Judicial System With much of the population beginning to settle after the first week, the government finally began to gain a handle on governance. The most pressing problem to the second congress The Presidency of Poly_Sci_Mage: 26 December 2015 - 9 January 2016 Poly_Sci_Mage had been a senator, a moderator, and the governor of New Egypt since the inception of the server. Being a staff member, he was aware of the purpose of the first experiment, but even he could not curb its effects. The National Famine and Cody's Rebellion The day the president took office, the server began an experiment to prove that political stability depended upon the fulfillment of the basic needs Westward Movements sdgdfsgsdfgsfdgf The Triangle Terror Attack and the CodyGuns Trial Failure to Maintain Influence: The Election of Jan. 8-9 The famine left Poly exhausted with server politics. Unwanting of another two weeks as president, and, believing that his failure to assemble a concerted response to the disaster had probably killed his immediate political prospects, he delighted in the idea of returning to his roles as senator and governor. However, he still had obligations to uphold: he had won the presidency in the first place by forging a political agreement between the New Egyptians and the Ohioans, requesting of his people that they vote for GreatGamer7, Governor of Ohio, in his run for senate, while the Ohioans would vote for Poly in the presidential election, on the condition that, in the next election, the New Egyptians would vote for GreatGamer in his own run for the presidency, and the Ohioans would vote for him in his return to the senate. Though the agreement appeared even on the surface, the Ohioans composed a much smaller percentage of the electorate than did the New Egyptians (roughly three to seven), putting them in a degree of debt to New Egypt; furthermore, Poly had also promised to commission the New Egypt Rail Company to build a railway from Cairo to Radiant Gardens, the capital of Ohio, further sweetening the deal. Poly hoped that those two conditions would give him some distant leverage over the presidency. This attempt to install a successor failed miserably. Upon hearing that the president would not seek a second term, Wolf382 suddenly returned to public life, and quickly announced his candidacy for president, running under the relevant slogan 'I will stop world hunger'. His outright star power crushed the semi-inactive, little-known governor from Ohio, taking 75% of the vote (15 to 6). The openness of Poly's endorsement may also have played a considerable role. The Second Presidency of Wolf382: 9 January - 7 February 2016 sdfgsdfgfdsg Economic Boom, Industrialization, and Cliftism/Polyism sdfgdfsgsdfgfd Political Polarization and the Conservative Movement The Election of the Contentious and the Virginian Junta The Feb 6-7 Election was the closest and most polarized thus far in server history. The KoehlDrexler won the presidency with less than half of the poplar vote, and by one vote. The fourth place senate seat had a two way (nearly a three-way) tie, and went into a runoff election. The Virginian Junta was the name given affectionately by staff to the three Virginian Communist's party members which took the majority in the senate with the February 6-7 Election.